Responsive Design: 9 Tips for Your WordPress Site

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Considering that smartphones have outstripped desktops regarding online searches, you must allow that "mobile is the future." With the steep rise in the mobile audience and Google's mobile-friendly updates, many companies worldwide have started to pay attention to adopting responsive design.

Responsive layouts are one of the most crucial factors that enable companies to offer a fantastic user experience to their customers. Now, you must be thinking, how?

No need to worry. I will describe each and every aspect of creating a fantastic, responsive WordPress site.

Today, WordPress powers 25 percent of the Web. No wonder developers are finally paying attention to developing and testing WordPress sites to make them fully responsive.

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Designers and developers across the world follow techniques to create enthralling Web sites that can run on a variety of users' screens without losing their look and feel. A site designed by adopting responsive techniques allows users to browse the exact same site layout on a variety of devices.

1. Give Soul to Your Web Site with CSS & HTML

CSS are the base that allows developers to build responsive layouts. The CSS codes are written for the HTML elements that you want for any given effect per your proposed design.

The combination of CSS3 and HTML5 allows any developer create an incredible WordPress Web site. So, you can say that there is an enormous scope for designers and developers when it comes to showing creativity and innovation with Web site designs.

2. Use the Power of PHP

The WordPress platform supports PHP, so use PHP. For instance, if you want to align your brand's logo and site navigation, you can add this code to your functions.php file:

3. Create Grids for Responsive Design

Bootstrap provides a grid system for creating responsive layouts. Be aware that you have to be more cautious when building a responsive design for your WordPress site.

Grids play a critical role in responsive Web design. If you want to make your site to adapt any screen size, then you must use the proper code. Grids allow easy resizing so that all the essential elements of your site fit, regardless of device.

4. Optimize Images for Responsive Design

Images are the most crucial element of any responsive Web site. While creating a responsive design for your site, you must optimize the images. Image optimization will dramatically reduce bandwidth and scaling issues.

Concerning image format, you can use JPEG, GIF, and PNG-8. But, remember one thing, avoid using the PNG format as it can impact the overall size of the site and images by at least five times.

Add the code below to make your images responsive:

img {
max-width: 100%;
}

Further, you can follow this link, to get detailed information on creating responsive images.

5. Provide Life with jQuery and JavaScript

Use jQuery and JavaScript to make your pages livelier. With the aid of these two, you can add effects such as slide up/down, fade in/out, hide/show, and several other animation effects to your pages. jQuery and JavaScript both empower WordPress developers to enhance the overall user experience of the developing Websites.

6. Use Options Provided by WordPress

WordPress offers you two ways to make your site responsive. Let's check them out:

You know there are a plethora of WordPress plugins available that allow quick integration and reduce the effort required for making your WordPress site responsive. Use those WordPress plugins to make your Web site mobile-friendly and save your valuable time and effort.

To make your site responsive, you can rely on a theme switcher. Irrespective of the kind of smartphone, OS, or even browser, this theme switcher allows you to select different mobile themes for each mobile browser. However, if you are looking for consistency across all devices, this is not a viable option.

7. Mobile-Friendly WordPress Themes: The Ultimate Choice

Without a doubt, responsive Website design has become the essence of modern day Web design. There are several mobile-friendly WordPress themes available that you can use to make your Web site responsive.

If you are thinking about the benefits of using WordPress responsive themes, then check this out:

Most of the themes are free. So, there is no need to pay anything.

These themes have powerful features that offer easy site management and customization. Further, you will have ample choices of themes that will vary in available features, choose the relevant one that best fits your needs.

8. Use Online Tools to Check Responsiveness

For checking the responsiveness of your Website, you can rely on several free online tools. These online tools enable you to test the mobile-friendliness of your WordPress site. Just take a glance at the list of online emulators that you can employ for testing the responsiveness of your Web site.

These tools allow you to test your Web site in a trouble-free manner. Further, they save your valuable time, money and energy.

9. Points to Remember

Whenever you plan to transform your WordPress site into a responsive one, always keep these points in mind:

Never use absolute positioning if you can help it.

Avoid using excessive text as it may affect the layout of your Web site on mobile devices.

Structure your site correctly; otherwise, 'div' issues can make it quite complicated for you.

Use JavaScript/jQuery but only up to a limit.

Summing Up

This post unzips some tricks for making a WordPress Web site more responsive. I hope the points raised above may prove beneficial to you. Don't forget to comment; your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

About the Author

Abhyudaya Tripathi is a digital marketing expert with more than 8 years of experience and presently he is an Associate Director at ResultFirst – Digital Marketing Company. His area of expertise covers everything that comes under the umbrella of digital marketing that is content marketing. Off duty, he loves to travel and devour delicious Indian street food.

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